Evolution is actually based on ability to reproduce. Seriously. When someone talks about "evolutionary fitness", they're talking about how well that animal can pass along it's genes. Brighter colors, a better way to get food, and other positives can enhance that. And negatives like weakness, blindness, etc. can decrease the ability to "get with the ladies".
The real problem is that there are conditions like Alzheimer's, MS, and others that aren't normally detected (outside of genetic screening) until AFTER the organism has had a good chance to pass on their genes. In a way, they're the "super-defects" - evolution is kind of powerless against them. By the time the chicks figure out that there's something wrong with you, you've already turned out a whole bunch of young 'uns to keep the family legacy alive...
>To word it differently, what if we mistakenly classifly a positive as a negative based on our perception of it,
A classic example is obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). If you look at highly succesful doctors (and those in other demanding professions), a very high percentage of them have a detectable level of OCD... in very tiny amounts, it can be a really helpful thing. But it doesn't take much at all before it can quickly turns into a very BAD thing.
>next you're going too be able to determine the sex of your child.
You already can. There are now machines that will seperate sperm cells that have either an X or a Y chromosome... because the Y chromosome is so much smaller than the X, the machines are able to shine a light through each individual cell, and with a decent degree of accurateness, decide which it is.
It's easy: For the P4, Rambus DOES outperform DDR. Not by much, granted - and recently, DDR and Rambus have been about the same price. That would mean that Rambus actually made MORE sense for the P4.
Now as to the future, that's a little unclear. There is now PC2700 DDR, but no official support for it - and Rambus was about to get bumped up in speed, too.
My real guess is that what we REALLY want for the multi-gigahertz processors is QDR (DDR2) memory, especially if the motherboard manufacturers will be willing to interleave multiple banks, like the nForce does...
At the Intel developper forum, Craig Barrett of Intel gave his predictions for what will happen with real-world CPU's in the next 15 years. Intel has historically come pretty close to fulfilling their "predictions", so I have at least a little confidence in this. The details are at the bottom of this page, but here are some tidbits:
2 billion transistors
30GHz clock frequencies
10nm (0.01-micron) transistors
Processing power of 1 trillion instructions per second
Built on 300nm (12") wafers eventually moving to 18" wafers and beyond
You're not limitted by how fast an electron can move, exactly. In fact, electrons move VERY slowly in common situations - the drift velocity in home wiring can be several feet per *second*.
When you shove a few extra electrons in one end of a wire, the charge pushes a few electrons that were already IN the wire down a little. And they push some down a little, and they push some down a little. Just like standing in a tight line at the movies, and shoving the guy in front of you - it takes a little bit of time to propagate all the way down.
So the real question is "If I shove an electron in this end of the conductor, how long before I get one out the other end?" The two things that determine that are (1) the nature of the conductor, and (2) the length of the conductor. By keeping the amount of circuitry on the IC very, very small (which they assuredly did), the propagation time from one end to the other drops proportionately.
However, even beyond just making the die smaller, they are working on making materials propagate the electrical charge more quickly - recently, someone (probably IBM) showed that by using a stressed crystalline lattice, they could significantly decrease the amount of time it took to propagate from one end to the other.
As others have stated, the size of the circuit plays a very large role in the upper limits of the chip's frequency. It's one thing to make a single IC with very little circuitry that runs at 100+ GHz, but it's entirely another to build a CPU with tens of millions of transistors that will run at the same speed....
So, right now, it's the same as always happens. A manufacturer (usually IBM) will find a new way of getting a chip to do more, then it will take the long road of trying to move from laboratory and test-circuits to real-word manufacturing lines. It's generally at least a year or two before any of the announced develoments make it into real-world chips. If you look at the announcement, IBM has been making SiGe chips for a good while now, and it still hasn't (yet) made it into mainstream production. Once the kinks are worked out, and the few initial purchasers pay for the R&D, then you'll see it go mainstream.
>When in engineering school (a couple of years ago) my professor declared that we are moving towards the end of the speed and size improvements of microchips, because soon the assumptions aboout newtonian physics, on which circuit design is based on, will stop being reliable.
And they've been saying that for over ten years.... and so far, it just hasn't happened.
>Well I guess the quantumn barrier was a lot further than i thought it was.
That's the problem with those pundits - when they make those statements, they assume that no more technological advancements will be found. And even if that were right, there's still a lot of the current CPU-manufacturing process that can be tweaked and milked.
Look at some of the recent technological findings - like copper interconnects and SOI. It took a couple of years before they even began to see introductory usage, and SOI is still far from being mainstream. And then again, a lot of chips are still being made on the 0.17 micron process. And to top it off, 0.10 and even 0.07-micron processes are in the works. Even without any new technological discoveries, the move to 0.07 micron SOI chips has the potential to last us through several more 18-month generations!
So what about other technologies? There's another manufacturing trick that's being refined right now that allows the crevisces between transisters to be made deeper than they are wide, which will allow us to pack even more transistors on a chip. And why stop with aluminum interconnects? Find a way to use silver. And there was a recent announcement about using stressed lattices to get even faster propagation. There are a lot of developments in the works. Yes, eventually we will hit a quantum limit - but I'm confident that it won't happen any time soon.
Yes, a great deal of it does come from Asia. And I, for one, don't get any legitimate email from Asia - so I simply deny all incoming SMTP connections from APNIC's IP ranges. That alone does wonders for the amount of spam that I received...
AMD has a nice dual-bus SMP architecture. Via has the DDR333 RAM. NVidea has the dual-banked DDR266. If we could either of these memory architectures paired up with the dual-bus SMP Athlon systems, then we would have the making of a VERY serious dual-CPU machine.
Come to think of it, I recall reading that by adding more north bridges from the 760MP chipset, you could have more than 2 Athlons on a board. If someone were to make a quad Athlon board with dual-banked DDR333, that would be a SERIOUS piece of iron for the enterprise, and at a very reasonable price. It's too bad that everyone's afraid of stepping on Intel's toes...
His statement that life is analog is not *entirely* correct. The comment on nervous systems is an especially good example! In many ways, the nervous system acts much more like a digital system than an analog system. For example, there is no such thing as a "strong" vs. a "weak" pulse in a nervous system - it's an on-or-off thing, a 1 or a zero. A "stronger" message is sent by firing along the nerve more frequently. I don't think that ANYONE would consider that an analog design!
Years ago, I worked at an ISP that ran partly on Solaris, mostly on Linux. A few MS reps came in to try and get us to switch to NT. We let them go through their routine, then walked them around the operations room, telling them the capabilities of what we had, and asking if NT would match them. The response was repetetively "no". When we pressed them on a few issues, they gave in rather easily. When we asked them why you couldn't bind another IP to an ethernet card under NT without a reboot, they admitted "lazy programming."
So, take the MS reps through the operation, tell them the capabilities. Ask them if they can meet or exceed them. If they say "Yes", you're either not using the real capabilities of your Linux machines, or they're lying.
I get to come in late, I have semi-flexible hours, they buy us lunch on Fridays, they pay me reasonably well, and they let us keep a couple of ferrets. The only thing that would make it better is if they got that ex-stripper to come back and work for us again....
>Electric power: While Edison may have been motivated by the ideals of science, his protege Tesla was not. Tesla's inventions were designed to make money and satisfy his ego.
Everything I've read on the subject says that you go t the two reversed....
Better compression? Holy cow, how many pictures do you need to store on that 256 MB card?
I'd rather see more effort going into putting decent video compression codecs into these cameras, as some of them already capture MPEG movies, although the frame-rate is low. With a higher frame-rate and better compression ratios in a semi-economical camera, "regular" digital cameras could give DV cameras a real run for their money - and would probably merge into one, as the price of DV comes down dramatically.
You have the chance to implant mind-control units, instantly creating thousands of slave-warriors all over the globe, and you even paused for thought? Geez, what kind of evil genius are you?
At work, we have a subscription to The Perl Journal, and enjoy reading it. The problem with a web site is that very few people are willing to pay to read online content. It's a lot easier to make someone pay $5 to read a magazine than to allow them access to a few web pages!
Another reason is that you can also control how much the information is shared with a magazine - while 10 of us might read the same magazine at work, if it were an online magazine, how many thousands of people could easily share the same registration - like the oft-used "global regitrations" to the NY Times?
Steve
Re:Two monitors verse multiple desktops
on
Panasonic Dual-LCD PC
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, I think that they might, if even a tiny fraction of home users were even aware that they could use two monitors!
Multiple desktops are nice, but they simply are not a substitute for seeing two seperate apps simultaneously. Rather than switching desktops to look at your "other" app, then switch back to the first, you just look at the other monitor, then back. It's a terrific thing.
The one area that they don't make a lot of sense in (yet) is gaming. Those who are in it for the gaming should just save for the 21" monitor.
(I have a 21" at home, and 2x17" at work. Each has it's benefits and drawbacks. The only way for me to choose the "best" of the two would be to buy 2x21".)
Yes, GCC makes the kernel and all of the other parts of the OS work on lots of different platforms. But let's face it, the OS alone is not enough. Linux has fought a long, hard, uphill battle for the desktop. Why is that? Because developping GUI apps for Linux is more difficult than it is for Windows. Tools like C++ Builder and Delphi make it possible to spin out high-quality apps in a lot less time - and it also GREATLY widens the number of programmers (and programs!) that can very easily switch over to Linux!
So, this isn't going to make the kernel any more portable, and it might not make life any better for those running Linux on an Alpha - but for the great, vast majority of people who use Linux as a desktop, this has the potential to be VERY useful!
Now, when you're hit with the flood of SPAM coming from an APNIC IP address, you can just respond to the system administrator of the open relay, like this:
"Greetings fellow Falun Gong brother. Your idea to encrypt message as commercial email is brilliant! I definitely agree that we need to move our geurilla forces into Tibet immediately, so that we may work against the tyranical Chinese regime."
Now *that* would likely get those open relays closed!
> One of the biggest components are the power supplies. They also fail a lot
So far, in over a decade and countless machines, I haven't had a single power supply go out - but I've had plenty of power supply FANS go out. I think that even an extra $5 fan could increase the MTBF of most all non-industrial-strength power supplies.
>and have a crappy system, you can't get it much smaller than it is.
Why not? Are you saying that all notebooks are crappy? look inside a computer case. Nearly all of the space is empty. With a little bit of thought, you can reduce a *lot* of that. Think that will make cooling hard? Not necessarily. If done right, it can *increase* cooling ability.
>PCI could be replaced with something smaller, but that won't work, because nobody will be making products for your new bus
Like I said, it's going to be replaced anyway. If they used something like Infiniband (which can be used for accessories, memory, processors, anything you want), it's just a matter of hooking up another fiber or two. Faster, smaller, cooler, more reliable, and draws less power. How can you lose?
Screw form factor. I can deal without that one square foot. What *I* want is for case manufacturers and motherboard manufacturers to agree on some sort of standard for hooking up chassis LED/switches.
Yeah, I know. It sounds trivial. But with a lot of motherboards, it takes more time to futz around with those little wires than it does to install the motherboard, CPU, and memory. There's something inherantly wrong there.
Slashdot Mirror
Evolution is actually based on ability to reproduce. Seriously. When someone talks about "evolutionary fitness", they're talking about how well that animal can pass along it's genes. Brighter colors, a better way to get food, and other positives can enhance that. And negatives like weakness, blindness, etc. can decrease the ability to "get with the ladies".
The real problem is that there are conditions like Alzheimer's, MS, and others that aren't normally detected (outside of genetic screening) until AFTER the organism has had a good chance to pass on their genes. In a way, they're the "super-defects" - evolution is kind of powerless against them. By the time the chicks figure out that there's something wrong with you, you've already turned out a whole bunch of young 'uns to keep the family legacy alive...
steve
>To word it differently, what if we mistakenly classifly a positive as a negative based on our perception of it,
A classic example is obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). If you look at highly succesful doctors (and those in other demanding professions), a very high percentage of them have a detectable level of OCD... in very tiny amounts, it can be a really helpful thing. But it doesn't take much at all before it can quickly turns into a very BAD thing.
steve
>next you're going too be able to determine the sex of your child.
You already can. There are now machines that will seperate sperm cells that have either an X or a Y chromosome... because the Y chromosome is so much smaller than the X, the machines are able to shine a light through each individual cell, and with a decent degree of accurateness, decide which it is.
steve
It's easy: For the P4, Rambus DOES outperform DDR. Not by much, granted - and recently, DDR and Rambus have been about the same price. That would mean that Rambus actually made MORE sense for the P4.
Now as to the future, that's a little unclear. There is now PC2700 DDR, but no official support for it - and Rambus was about to get bumped up in speed, too.
My real guess is that what we REALLY want for the multi-gigahertz processors is QDR (DDR2) memory, especially if the motherboard manufacturers will be willing to interleave multiple banks, like the nForce does...
steve
steve
You're not limitted by how fast an electron can move, exactly. In fact, electrons move VERY slowly in common situations - the drift velocity in home wiring can be several feet per *second*.
When you shove a few extra electrons in one end of a wire, the charge pushes a few electrons that were already IN the wire down a little. And they push some down a little, and they push some down a little. Just like standing in a tight line at the movies, and shoving the guy in front of you - it takes a little bit of time to propagate all the way down.
So the real question is "If I shove an electron in this end of the conductor, how long before I get one out the other end?" The two things that determine that are (1) the nature of the conductor, and (2) the length of the conductor. By keeping the amount of circuitry on the IC very, very small (which they assuredly did), the propagation time from one end to the other drops proportionately.
However, even beyond just making the die smaller, they are working on making materials propagate the electrical charge more quickly - recently, someone (probably IBM) showed that by using a stressed crystalline lattice, they could significantly decrease the amount of time it took to propagate from one end to the other.
steve
As others have stated, the size of the circuit plays a very large role in the upper limits of the chip's frequency. It's one thing to make a single IC with very little circuitry that runs at 100+ GHz, but it's entirely another to build a CPU with tens of millions of transistors that will run at the same speed....
So, right now, it's the same as always happens. A manufacturer (usually IBM) will find a new way of getting a chip to do more, then it will take the long road of trying to move from laboratory and test-circuits to real-word manufacturing lines. It's generally at least a year or two before any of the announced develoments make it into real-world chips. If you look at the announcement, IBM has been making SiGe chips for a good while now, and it still hasn't (yet) made it into mainstream production. Once the kinks are worked out, and the few initial purchasers pay for the R&D, then you'll see it go mainstream.
steve
>When in engineering school (a couple of years ago) my professor declared that we are moving towards the end of the speed and size improvements of microchips, because soon the assumptions aboout newtonian physics, on which circuit design is based on, will stop being reliable.
And they've been saying that for over ten years.... and so far, it just hasn't happened.
>Well I guess the quantumn barrier was a lot further than i thought it was.
That's the problem with those pundits - when they make those statements, they assume that no more technological advancements will be found. And even if that were right, there's still a lot of the current CPU-manufacturing process that can be tweaked and milked.
Look at some of the recent technological findings - like copper interconnects and SOI. It took a couple of years before they even began to see introductory usage, and SOI is still far from being mainstream. And then again, a lot of chips are still being made on the 0.17 micron process. And to top it off, 0.10 and even 0.07-micron processes are in the works. Even without any new technological discoveries, the move to 0.07 micron SOI chips has the potential to last us through several more 18-month generations!
So what about other technologies? There's another manufacturing trick that's being refined right now that allows the crevisces between transisters to be made deeper than they are wide, which will allow us to pack even more transistors on a chip. And why stop with aluminum interconnects? Find a way to use silver. And there was a recent announcement about using stressed lattices to get even faster propagation. There are a lot of developments in the works. Yes, eventually we will hit a quantum limit - but I'm confident that it won't happen any time soon.
steve
>much of it these days is originating from Asia
Yes, a great deal of it does come from Asia. And I, for one, don't get any legitimate email from Asia - so I simply deny all incoming SMTP connections from APNIC's IP ranges. That alone does wonders for the amount of spam that I received...
steve
AMD has a nice dual-bus SMP architecture. Via has the DDR333 RAM. NVidea has the dual-banked DDR266. If we could either of these memory architectures paired up with the dual-bus SMP Athlon systems, then we would have the making of a VERY serious dual-CPU machine.
Come to think of it, I recall reading that by adding more north bridges from the 760MP chipset, you could have more than 2 Athlons on a board. If someone were to make a quad Athlon board with dual-banked DDR333, that would be a SERIOUS piece of iron for the enterprise, and at a very reasonable price. It's too bad that everyone's afraid of stepping on Intel's toes...
steve
His statement that life is analog is not *entirely* correct. The comment on nervous systems is an especially good example! In many ways, the nervous system acts much more like a digital system than an analog system. For example, there is no such thing as a "strong" vs. a "weak" pulse in a nervous system - it's an on-or-off thing, a 1 or a zero. A "stronger" message is sent by firing along the nerve more frequently. I don't think that ANYONE would consider that an analog design!
steve
Years ago, I worked at an ISP that ran partly on Solaris, mostly on Linux. A few MS reps came in to try and get us to switch to NT. We let them go through their routine, then walked them around the operations room, telling them the capabilities of what we had, and asking if NT would match them. The response was repetetively "no". When we pressed them on a few issues, they gave in rather easily. When we asked them why you couldn't bind another IP to an ethernet card under NT without a reboot, they admitted "lazy programming."
So, take the MS reps through the operation, tell them the capabilities. Ask them if they can meet or exceed them. If they say "Yes", you're either not using the real capabilities of your Linux machines, or they're lying.
steve
I get to come in late, I have semi-flexible hours, they buy us lunch on Fridays, they pay me reasonably well, and they let us keep a couple of ferrets. The only thing that would make it better is if they got that ex-stripper to come back and work for us again....
steve
>Electric power: While Edison may have been motivated by the ideals of science, his protege Tesla was not. Tesla's inventions were designed to make money and satisfy his ego.
Everything I've read on the subject says that you go t the two reversed....
steve
Better compression? Holy cow, how many pictures do you need to store on that 256 MB card?
I'd rather see more effort going into putting decent video compression codecs into these cameras, as some of them already capture MPEG movies, although the frame-rate is low. With a higher frame-rate and better compression ratios in a semi-economical camera, "regular" digital cameras could give DV cameras a real run for their money - and would probably merge into one, as the price of DV comes down dramatically.
steve
I want to know what Eve Andersson will be doing now that ArsDigita been sold...
I suppose that hiring her as my personal masseuese isn't very realistic.
steve
You have the chance to implant mind-control units, instantly creating thousands of slave-warriors all over the globe, and you even paused for thought? Geez, what kind of evil genius are you?
steve
At work, we have a subscription to The Perl Journal, and enjoy reading it. The problem with a web site is that very few people are willing to pay to read online content. It's a lot easier to make someone pay $5 to read a magazine than to allow them access to a few web pages!
Another reason is that you can also control how much the information is shared with a magazine - while 10 of us might read the same magazine at work, if it were an online magazine, how many thousands of people could easily share the same registration - like the oft-used "global regitrations" to the NY Times?
Steve
Well, I think that they might, if even a tiny fraction of home users were even aware that they could use two monitors!
Multiple desktops are nice, but they simply are not a substitute for seeing two seperate apps simultaneously. Rather than switching desktops to look at your "other" app, then switch back to the first, you just look at the other monitor, then back. It's a terrific thing.
The one area that they don't make a lot of sense in (yet) is gaming. Those who are in it for the gaming should just save for the 21" monitor.
(I have a 21" at home, and 2x17" at work. Each has it's benefits and drawbacks. The only way for me to choose the "best" of the two would be to buy 2x21".)
steve
Yes, GCC makes the kernel and all of the other parts of the OS work on lots of different platforms. But let's face it, the OS alone is not enough. Linux has fought a long, hard, uphill battle for the desktop. Why is that? Because developping GUI apps for Linux is more difficult than it is for Windows. Tools like C++ Builder and Delphi make it possible to spin out high-quality apps in a lot less time - and it also GREATLY widens the number of programmers (and programs!) that can very easily switch over to Linux!
So, this isn't going to make the kernel any more portable, and it might not make life any better for those running Linux on an Alpha - but for the great, vast majority of people who use Linux as a desktop, this has the potential to be VERY useful!
steve
Now, when you're hit with the flood of SPAM coming from an APNIC IP address, you can just respond to the system administrator of the open relay, like this:
"Greetings fellow Falun Gong brother. Your idea to encrypt message as commercial email is brilliant! I definitely agree that we need to move our geurilla forces into Tibet immediately, so that we may work against the tyranical Chinese regime."
Now *that* would likely get those open relays closed!
steve
> One of the biggest components are the power supplies. They also fail a lot
So far, in over a decade and countless machines, I haven't had a single power supply go out - but I've had plenty of power supply FANS go out. I think that even an extra $5 fan could increase the MTBF of most all non-industrial-strength power supplies.
steve
> Unless you want to replcae pci
PCI is slated to be replaced anyway.
>and have a crappy system, you can't get it much smaller than it is.
Why not? Are you saying that all notebooks are crappy? look inside a computer case. Nearly all of the space is empty. With a little bit of thought, you can reduce a *lot* of that. Think that will make cooling hard? Not necessarily. If done right, it can *increase* cooling ability.
>PCI could be replaced with something smaller, but that won't work, because nobody will be making products for your new bus
Like I said, it's going to be replaced anyway. If they used something like Infiniband (which can be used for accessories, memory, processors, anything you want), it's just a matter of hooking up another fiber or two. Faster, smaller, cooler, more reliable, and draws less power. How can you lose?
steve
Screw form factor. I can deal without that one square foot. What *I* want is for case manufacturers and motherboard manufacturers to agree on some sort of standard for hooking up chassis LED/switches.
Yeah, I know. It sounds trivial. But with a lot of motherboards, it takes more time to futz around with those little wires than it does to install the motherboard, CPU, and memory. There's something inherantly wrong there.
steve
They could have just used your SSN, so that you have to give it out to a hundred MORE companies and organizations that would be very careless with it.
steve